Research firm IDC reported in October
that Acer
had kicked Dell from the second spot in the top global computer
shippers list. This week, IDC has released the numbers for CPU
shipments for Q3 2009. The processor market grew compared to the
same quarter of 2008 by 23%. Since a large portion of the processors
shipped were lower cost netbook parts, overall revenue in the CPU
marker grew, but not as robustly as sales.

Netbook processors
were the big driver, pushed by demand in China. Overall revenue in
the global market for the quarter grew 14.1% to $7.4 billion.
Shipments of CPUs for the quarter exceeded Q3 2008, which was a
record quarter.

IDC's Shane Rau said in a statement, "Compared
to where the market was at the beginning of 2009, PC processors have
come back remarkably strong." Rau warned, "The Chinese
market can be very opaque -- there are lots of places where
inventories can hide. We have to be on the lookout for when China
decides it can't consume more processors. Meanwhile, the U.S. market
is still hamstrung by housing foreclosures and rising job
losses."

Over the quarter, the average selling price of
CPUs dropped more than 7%. That is a result of more growth in the
cheap netbook processor market. Intel maintained the clear lead in
the CPU market with 81.1% of the market. AMD ended the quarter with
18.7% of the market with VIA holding about 0.2% of the total CPU
market globally.

"While Atom processors led the PC
processor market to reach record unit shipments, on the revenue side,
their low average selling price led to notable price erosion, more
than 7%," Rau said.

Comments

Threshold

Username

Password

remember me

This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

AMD's 19% market share isn't bad, considering Intel was essentially bribing companies not to use AMD chips. Still, compared to other technical things, such as the percentage of Windows to Linux to MacOS, or the ration of IE to FireFox to Safari, 19%is pretty solid when you're up against an opponent several times larger with far deeper pockets.

"Intel is investing heavily (think gazillions of dollars and bazillions of engineering man hours) in resources to create an Intel host controllers spec in order to speed time to market of the USB 3.0 technology." -- Intel blogger Nick Knupffer